There are currently two solutions to make recommendations of products to a user.
A first one uses human experts that take advantage of their in-depth knowledge of the market to find products similar to the ones about which a given user has expressed preferences. Such a solution cannot be automated.
A second approach called “collaborative filtering” tries to find similarities between the opinions of different users and bases its predictions on the group behavior of users. Such an approach does not use relevant attributes of the product itself, which leads to errors in the recommendations.
The present invention aims at providing a new solution for making recommendations of products to a dedicated user.
Another purpose of the present invention is to provide an automatic system for establishing a profile for the scent or taste preferences of a given user, and to use this profile to make recommendations or to predict if this user will enjoy or not the smell or taste of a given product.
Another purpose of the present invention is to minimize the participation of the user in order to establish his profile.
Another purpose of the invention is to provide a method and system which is reliable and which does not take into account the opinions of other users to establish the profile of a given user.
Given that the present invention can be equally easily applied to the scent or taste of products, in the following, these characteristics of the products will simply be referred to as the sensory characteristics of the products. It is to be understood that this expression only encompasses the sense of olfaction or of taste, and is used as a convenient abbreviation.